13 July 2009

A paper at the 2009 IFLA Congress compares the citation impact of open access (OA) and non open access (non-OA) agricultural research outputs.

Kayvan Kousha and Mahshid Abdoli from Iran posed themselves three research questions:

At the article level, is there significant difference between citation counts of OA and non-OA articles appearing in non-OA journals index by ISI?

At the journal level, is there significant difference between the Impact Factors of OA and non-OA journals as reported by ISI Journal Citation Reports?

Do OA publications deposited online by FAO tend to attract higher citations than its non-OA publications in the same year?

While mentioning some limitations, the answers they found are:

"The results showed that there is an obvious citation advantage for self-archived agriculture articles as compared to non-OA articles." - "results indicate that self-archived research articles published in the non-OA agriculture journals could attract nearly two times more citations than their non-OA counterparts."

"At the journal level, the average Impact Factor for OA agriculture journals during 2005-2007 was 0.29, considerably lower than the average Impact Factor for non-OA journals (0.73). - "although at the article level self-archiving could considerably increase articles’ citation impact in the same non-OA journal, this does not imply that open access journals themselves have a higher Impact Factor than non-OA journals."

"FAO publications which were freely accessible online tended to attract more citations than non-OA publications in the same year."